speed Tagged Articles at Cinematical

I'm not certain when, exactly, my long-time fascination with trains was born, but it probably started the first time I walked through Union Station in Los Angeles, a cathedral dedicated to mass transit that opened in 1939. Opportunities to ride the rails were few and far between, so I treasured any chance to experience a train trip vicariously through the movies. Eventually I moved to New York and, still later, visited Europe, banking thousands of hours on all manner of subways and trains. Still, I've never had a personal train trip as thrilling as those I've enjoyed at the movies. With Tony Scott's The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 racing into theaters tomorrow, let's honor a few of the films that have provided terrific train thrills of the cinematic variety.

1. Runaway Train
The other movies on this list feature excellent scenes set on or around trains or subways (see also "Honorable Mention" and "Sensational Subway Scenes" after the jump) but Andrei Konchalovsky's thriller, based on a screenplay by Akira Kurosawa, spends the majority of its running time on a train speeding through the bitterly cold, snowy winter landscapes of Alaska. Jon Voight and Eric Robert are two hardened convicts who've broken out of prison and, by chance, happen upon the just-departing train. When the engineer suffers a heart attack, the cons are at the controls of an out-of-control beast they cannot hope to master.

2. Spider-Man 2
I'll dance around needless spoilers by saying there is a coda to the runaway train scene that caught me unaware, filled with grace and humanity. That elevates a very good, thrilling, fast-paced suspense sequence involving helpless passengers and the heroic, masked Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) as he fights Doc Ock (Alfred Molina).

When you're reading an interview with Dennis Hopper, you expect him to admit things like the following: that he once sold a priceless Lichtenstein painting for a thousand bucks, attended an orgy with Natalie Wood, and used to drink "half a gallon of rum and 30 beers a day." We're talking about Dennis Hopper, here. In order to surprise us, he's going to have to do a lot better than that -- and so he has. During an interesting interview with the Guardian that went up yesterday, Hopper held forth with some super-cryptic mumblings about his possible appearance in Speed 3 (!)

To back up a bit, it's the inteviewer who first brings up the topic, claiming to have some insider knowledge about it. He tells us, the reader, that the film is "due to include" a performance by Hopper, and that it's his intention to ask Hopper "plenty of questions" about it. I certainly hope so. When he finally gets around to it, however, the only thing Hopper will say is this: "It's a river of shit from which I have tried to extract some gold." Huh? The Speed series is a river of shit? The process of resurrecting your character for a third film when he clearly died in the first film is a river of shit? What are you talking about, druggy?

I personally think what we have here is an over-zealous reporter trying to make some news where none exists. Speed 2 more or less bombed at the box-office, when you consider its sizeable budget and the expectations that everyone had from the previous film. I've certainly heard nothing about a Speed 3, and as far as I know, no one is even thinking about it. So unless the movie is currently being filmed in complete secrecy under the title All About Steve (or Cloverfield), I think we can disregard this.

In the new film The Lake House, Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock play residents of the same house, but in different years, who are able to correspond via time-traveling letters. Although the premise is pretty fantastic, the first response I get from people is not about the time displacement, but about the fact that the characters still practice the old-fashioned art of letter writing rather than email. After all, The Shop Around the Corner was already updated for the digital age as You've Got Mail. Now we get this film about physical, tree-wasting post?

Well, it turns out Reeves and Bullock can relate pretty well to their characters. They have been pen-pals, with the pen being literal, since they starred together in Speed twelve years ago. In fact Reeves doesn't even own a computer and avoids email as much as possible. This is Neo, for goodness sakes! Bullock defends him, though, saying that email is not as "special." She says, "I love keeping in contact with Keanu through letters because I can revisit our conversations whenever I like."

Best known for the film Speed, Jan de Bont has signed on to direct another action-packed thrill-ride called Stopping Power. Pic will revolve around a single father on vacation with his daughter and girlfriend. When the RV they're traveling in gets hijacked, the father finds himself wrapped up in a high-speed police chase across town, forced to act as a decoy in the getaway car.

Damn, talk about a crappy situation: One minute you're enjoying some Wheat Thins in the back of your RV, and the next you're being chased by the cops, wanted for a crime you did not commit and your family is missing. Sure, it gets you out of cleaning the RV's septic (tank? pipe? bag?) for the day but, personally, I'd clean that bad boy with a toothpick if it meant I would avoid going to prison.

Du Bont is also behind such films as Twister, The Haunting and, most recently, Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Cradle of Life. Richard Shepard (The Matador) will be doing the rewrite off an original script penned by Eric Red. No word yet on the casting front, though I'm sure you will hear the name Keanu Reeves tossed around quite a bit. However, I could see Paul Walker landing this kind of gig.